"And none of this is to suggest that institutions with very high prices ... aren't going to collapse. THEY WILL. And there may well be more people who get smart <who> go to a lower priced school rather than to the unaffordable "best" school they get into."
(Emphasis mine & I removed the aid discount, since that's all that it really is - a discount.)
Notice that "best" is not really the "best" it's only conditionally the "best".
And when this is applied world wide, MOOCs will transform education, and vast numbers of educational institutions will pivot towards research, private industry partnerships or disappear altogether.
In the end I believe that with MOOCs the world will be smarter, and the elite institutions more exclusive and elite. They will return to being class dating organizations that they once were before the idea of them being meritocratic academic institutions overtook them.
Harvard, Stanford will survive. MIT, CalTech will excel. Cornell, Brown, UPenn, Yale, Princeton, the UCs, etc will struggle. None of them will be able to support their capital loads when the educational opportunities are presented significantly cheaper elsewhere. Add to that the fact that the Student Loan bubble will have burst, and student credit will be severely curtailed, and we see a significantly changed educational future.
Kodak indeed.